Skipping meals promotes weight gain

There are a host of lifestyle reasons that lead to weight gain, too. Skipping meals actually causes your body to gain weight over the long haul, because when you skip meals, your body slows down its metabolism and becomes very efficient at conserving calories (instead of burning calories).

Your body does this to protect you, because your body doesn't know when you'll feed it again, it stores more calories as fat so you'll have reserves on hand for the next time you skip a meal.

So if you eat little or nothing during the day and only eat at night, you're promoting higher weight, even if you aren't eating more total calories than you might have eaten if you ate three square meals a day, because your body is going to conserve more of those calories as fat.

The same thing happens to those who go on super low calorie diets. If you are on too low a calorie amount, your metabolism is going to slow down and your body will adapt to being starved. So, super low calorie diets do not work long-term.

The best way to lose weight is by keeping your metabolism sped up by spreading calories over the day, exercising regularly and not skipping meals or following a diet too low in calories.

It is possible to lose weight and keep it off. Many people who lose weight gain it back. But many others are able to keep it off. People who have kept weight off for a long time say these tips helped them:

• cutting back on calories and fat
• exercising almost every day
• eating breakfast
• writing down what they eat to keep tabs on what they eat